Category Archives: Elections

Could Democrats become states’ rights party?

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

People tend to think about how things work in relation to how well they’re working for them. That’s why some Democrats, who’ve won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote in two of the last five elections, want to get rid of the Electoral College, while many Republicans say it’s a pillar of democracy. If the results had been reversed, so would have been the arguments.

Which leads us to the 10th Amendment, sometimes known as federalism or states’ rights.

The 10th Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” As the national government has grown in recent years, it has been the most ignored amendment outside of the 18th, the one that prohibited the sale of alcohol, which was repealed by the 21st.

Some conservatives have called for bringing back the 10th Amendment, particularly during the last eight years when they didn’t like what the federal government was doing. They say states have different cultures, economies and histories and should be able to enact policies that fit themselves. Moreover, states should have the freedom to be laboratories of democracy, where ideas are subject to experimentation and then can be copied, modified or rejected by other states and the federal government.

Democrats have looked skeptically at returning power to the states, largely because the idea of “states’ rights” has been used to justify racial and other types of discrimination, including in Arkansas. Moreover, moving power to the states would make it harder to enact sweeping programs at the federal level, such as Obamacare.

But now here’s what Democrats, particularly in blue states, are facing. President Trump occupies the White House and leads the executive branch, and he has already nominated a Supreme Court justice who will give conservatives a 5-4 majority. Among the four “liberal” justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 and Stephen Breyer is 78, while the sometimes swing voter, Anthony Kennedy, is 80. By the time Trump leaves office, the Court could have a conservative tilt for decades to come.

Republicans also control the House and the Senate. True, Democrats could take back the Senate in 2018, but they would have to overcome two challenges. First, Republicans tend to do better in midterm elections because their older, more conservative voters vote more often. And second, Democrats have more to lose next year. Of the 33 Senate seats up for grabs, eight are held by Republicans and 23 are held by Democrats, while the other two seats are held by independents who vote with Democrats. Ten Democratic senators are running for re-election in states carried by Trump in 2016.

Democrats also face another problem with the national map: where they live. Democrats tend to cluster in big cities while Republicans are spread across the country, which is why Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million people but lost the election, and why there are more red states than blue ones. Demographic changes – an increasingly more diverse population in many parts of the country – have been expected to counteract this, but they obviously didn’t in 2016.

The result of all this is that some blue states, particularly California, are really getting the short end of the stick, and will continue to do so. With more than 39 million people, California’s population is almost as large as the 22 smallest states combined, including Arkansas. The people of those states have 44 U.S. senators between them, while Californians have two. It’s no wonder California is a donor state, meaning it sends more money to Washington, D.C., then it gets back. And it’s no wonder that there’s a growing movement among Californians to try to secede from the union. In fact, blue states tend to be donor states across the board, while red states tend to be receivers.

So could Democrats, particularly in big blue states like California, embrace returning some power to the states? If states had more power, President Trump would be less important, his secretary of education couldn’t tell people how to run their schools, and blue staters could keep more of their tax dollars.

So we’ll close with two questions. First, will Democrats give the 10th Amendment a try, now that they aren’t in charge of any part of the federal government?

And second, will Republicans turn their backs on the 10th Amendment, now that they are in charge of all of it?

All politics is now national

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“All politics is local,” the late U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to say, but that’s no longer the case. Now, all politics is national.

That’s according to Dr. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political science professor who spoke at the Clinton School of Public Service Thursday.

Abramowtiz said straight ticket voting, where voters choose candidates from the same party in all races, reached its highest level in 2012 in the 60 years that it’s been studied, and preliminary research shows 2016 no doubt followed that trend. That’s increasingly true whether voters are strong partisans, weak partisans, or independents who lean toward one party or the other. Most of those last folks are just “closet partisans” who won’t admit to themselves or to others that they are really a Republican or Democrat.

Abramowitz said this trend is being fueled by two causes: the increasing influence of presidential elections on down-ballot races, and the rise of “negative partisanship.” That’s where Americans are increasingly voting in partisan ways not because they like their party more but because they dislike the other party so much.

It wasn’t long ago that states and districts commonly selected one party’s candidate for president and the other party’s candidates in some of the congressional and other major races. The most famous example in Arkansas occurred in 1968, when voters pulled the lever for independent presidential candidate George Wallace, Democratic Sen. William Fulbright, and Republican Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. Even as Democrats dominated Arkansas politics until 2010, the state was voting for the Republican in every presidential election starting in 1980 except for 1992 and 1996, when a native son was on the ballot.

Back then, Arkansas Democrats could differentiate themselves from the national party even if they were more liberal than their constituents by restraining their impulses and emphasizing their independence.

Now, it’s all about the party and the presidential candidate. Asked by American National Election Studies to rate parties on a temperature scale with 100 being hottest and 0 being coldest, since 1978 Americans have consistently rated their own party around 70 degrees. However, the opposing party had dropped from just below 50 degrees to 30 degrees by 2012. Fifty-eight percent of Democrats rated President Trump at zero, and 56 percent of Republicans gave Hillary Clinton the same score. Sen. Mark Pryor’s incumbency and last name netted him all of 39 percent against Sen. Tom Cotton in 2014, when Pryor was one of four Democratic incumbent senators to lose in states that had voted for Republican Mitt Romney two years earlier. In 2016, all 34 Senate races were won by the candidate whose presidential candidate won the state. In fact, the only two incumbent senators who lost were Republicans in states won by Clinton. Of the 435 U.S. House seats, 400 were won by the candidate whose party’s presidential candidate won their district.

The old tools – incumbency, principled leadership, dedicated constituent service, even bringing home the bacon – simply don’t cut it any more. Pity the Democratic state legislators in Arkansas who try to buck the trend by explaining to 30,000 (in the House) and 86,000 (in the Senate) constituents why they’re still Democrats but different than Nancy Pelosi. That’s why Democrats in this state are either losing, not running for re-election, or switching parties, as three state legislators did following the November elections.

In hindsight, Gov. Mike Beebe’s 64-36 re-election in 2010 against a decent Republican opponent, and subsequent high poll numbers throughout the rest of his term, remain one of the most impressive political achievements of recent years. Of course, he didn’t have to run in 2014, as Pryor did.

Abramowitz did not offer much hope for Arkansas Democrats, or for the declining numbers of us truly independent voters, or for people who just don’t like partisan politics. We’re now trapped in a cycle. Politics in Washington, D.C., is becoming increasingly confrontational, which fuels voter disgust mostly with the other party, which encourages even more confrontational behavior in Washington, D.C.

So for the foreseeable future, all politics, or at least most of it, will be national. I wonder what Tip O’Neill, the dealmaker, would have to say about that. I wonder if he even would have been elected.

Follow the money

Rep. Jana Della Rosa, R-Rogers, argues for House Bill 1427 in committee.

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

There’s a scene in “All the President’s Men,” the movie about the Washington Post reporters who dogged the Nixon White House until the president resigned over Watergate. Reporter Bob Woodward, played by Robert Redford, meets in a darkened garage with his background source, “Deep Throat,” played by Hal Holbrook, and says the story is stuck. “Follow the money. … Just follow the money,” Holbrook’s character tells him.

It’s as true today as it was then. It’s my experience covering the State Capitol that most elected officials at the state level are decent folks, and when they compromise, it’s more often out of strategic necessity than a failure of character. Still, if you want to know the whole story in politics, you always have to follow the money.

Rep. Jana Della Rosa, R-Rogers, agrees, which is why, just as she did in her first legislative session in 2015, she’s sponsoring a bill that would make it much easier for any citizen with an internet connection to do what Woodward was trying to do.

House Bill 1427 would require candidates for constitutional offices (governor, attorney general, etc.), judicial offices, and state legislative seats to file all of their campaign finance reports online in a new, searchable database.

Here’s how that would change things. Currently, anyone can go on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website (votenaturally.org) and pull up the campaign finance reports for each individual candidate, one month at a time.

If House Bill 1427 passes, journalists, watchdog groups and average citizens could quickly search everything in the database and determine which lobbyists or political action committees have donated how much to whose campaigns. If an industry gets special treatment under the law, it would be much easier to see if campaign donations might have played a part.

If that last paragraph sounds like I’m bashing elected officials, I’m not. Winning elected office requires campaigning, and campaigning requires money, and then afterwards the winning candidates must make decisions that affect their donors. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one we have.

Efforts to limit campaign donations in recent years have failed, partly because of court decisions and partly because ours is a free market society where money will find its way to power. But we also have an open society where information is often even more powerful than money. So one very workable solution that is consistent with both a free market society and an open society is to make it really easy for average Arkansans to follow the money.

Della Rosa’s bill failed in 2015 based on some good excuses and some lame ones. Legislators said many candidates did not have access to reliable internet service, and they complained about the state’s balky online reporting system – both very good excuses. In 2016, Della Rosa pushed through an appropriation to build a new and very good online system that cost $670,000. So that good excuse is out. There’ve been two more years of improving internet service across the state, and the bill would let legislators in truly underserved areas file their reports the old-fashioned way, by paper. So that good excuse is pretty much gone, too.

That just leaves the lame excuses, such as the one offered in 2015 by one legislator who said he represented a district with a large paper industry presence, so he couldn’t vote for a bill that would reduce the use of paper.

Della Rosa’s bill passed the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee comfortably Wednesday on a voice vote. Several legislators spoke supportively. Rep. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, said the bill would force him to change his habits, but he was willing to do so because of the good that would come of it.

The bill now moves to the full House, where it was expected to be debated Friday and where it must pass by a two-thirds majority because it changes two initiated acts approved by the voters. Then it must pass through a Senate committee and the full Senate before landing on the governor’s desk.

Every legislator who votes for the bill is inviting more accountability and transparency. Instead of forcing voters to stumble around a darkened garage, they’re bringing a flashlight and shining it on themselves.

To borrow a line from another movie, “Jerry Maguire,” if it passes, it will show us the money. If we don’t follow it, it’s our fault.

He was playing chess; she was playing checkers

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Donald Trump won the Republican Party nomination because he was playing checkers while the other candidates were playing chess, and it was a checkers year. In November, the opposite happened: He checkmated Hillary Clinton while she was playing checkers.

Remember the primaries? Those 16 other mostly conventional Republican candidates were all playing chess – trying to execute their grand strategies and position themselves for Trump’s inevitable fade, or to be the last person standing against him. While they were staring at the chessboard, he just kept bouncing from state to state on the checkerboard until he reached the back row and shouted, “King me!”

In the general election, however, it was Clinton who tried to play checkers, while Trump realized it had become a chess match.

Checkers is a simple game, which is why we don’t hear much about “checkers masters.” The strategy involves a balance of offense and defense: You try to reach the opponent’s back row without allowing them to reach yours. If you play too aggressively, you leave yourself open, so it’s best just to plod along, pick up pieces and look for the double jumps.

That’s what Clinton did. Once she had that small lead in the polls, she played it safe and ran a same-old, same-old campaign. She didn’t reach out to voters who ordinarily wouldn’t support Democrats; those were discarded into her “basket of deplorables” and forgotten about. She thought her back row was protected by that supposed “blue wall” of states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that of course would vote for the Democrat because they always had. When that old Trump video where he talked about grabbing women surfaced, she thought she’d made a double jump right onto his back row.

Trump, meanwhile, was playing chess. Chess is an offensive game where you win by taking the opponent’s king regardless of what it costs you, and often by surprising the opponent. With checkers, you always know who’s winning; with chess, the player with fewer pieces can suddenly strike and end the game. So while Clinton’s campaign (and most pundits) were counting the number of checkers left on the board, Trump’s campaign found some holes in that blue wall and exploited them.

Meanwhile, Trump did what Clinton refused to do or could not do – find new voters.

The modern Republican Party has been an awkward coalition of business elites and socially conservative regular Americans whose interests sometimes conflict, particularly lately when those business elites are getting really rich while many regular Americans are struggling.

Trump saw that there are a lot more regular Americans than there are business elites, and some who typically vote for Democrats could become his voters. He could speak to them in a way that Mitt Romney couldn’t in 2012 because Trump is blunt and earthy and understands popular culture, and because Clinton, the daughter of a middle class Chicago small businessman, had become one of those elites herself. He wasn’t going to lose the regular Americans he already had, and he didn’t need the elites’ money because he’s already rich, he was getting so much free air time, and he’s a wizard at using free social media.

He realized that he could appeal to regular Americans’ legitimate fears and concerns – and, for some, to their misplaced grievances and their unacknowledged prejudices – by using the most effective and darkest campaign slogan in recent American history. A lot’s implied in “Make America Great Again,” especially that last word, “again,” as in, “It used to be great, but it’s not now, and here are the groups of people responsible for that.”

In the end, Clinton had 3 million more votes across the country, but Trump won the states that mattered most. Her checkerboard had more pieces, and so did her chessboard, but the checkers game didn’t matter, and he had surrounded her king with a bunch of pawns.

He recognized what no other candidates saw this election except perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders – that the game was different this time. In fact, both games were, and the trick was knowing when to play which. That’s why the Republicans who were playing chess had to king him in checkers. That’s why he captured Clinton’s king in the general election chess match while she was moving her checkers around the board. And that’s why he’s the nation’s 45th president, and they’re not.

Related: Trump played checkers and they played chess – in a checkers year

2016 wasn’t so bad

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

More than a few people are expressing their hopes for a happy new year by saying good riddance to the old – the basis being that they aren’t happy with the presidential election, along with the fact that a lot of famous people died in 2016, especially lately.

The truth is that famous people die every year, and it’s not the year’s fault. Also, whatever you think about the election, the good news is that we had one.

Consider that on March 1, almost 632,000 Arkansans went to the polls to help select the two major party candidates. Then in November, about 1.13 million Arkansans voted in the general election for one of those two candidates or for one of six others. In January, the current president will peacefully hand the Oval Office’s keys to his successor and become a private citizen, while the new president takes the reins of power only temporarily.

This process is fairly common around the world these days but rare throughout history, when power has often been transferred through war or intrigue or birthright. George Washington came along and just gave power up. As flawed as it was, the 2016 presidential election was a blessing, not a curse, when you consider many of the possible alternatives. As Winston Churchill once said, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

In fact, the 2016 campaign in some ways was remarkably open and democratic. The Republicans offered 17 candidates for president, each of whom had ample opportunities to make their case to the voters. Donald Trump won in part because he inspired first-time or infrequent voters to go to the polls. The Democrats offered the first female major party nominee, and her gender was not the defining issue. Third party candidates were treated, at least for a time, as candidates, not asterisks.

The campaign gave a shot of adrenaline to a political process that has grown predictable and stale. This time, the usual left-versus-right narrative simply didn’t apply. Both Trump and Bernie Sanders gave voice to legitimate concerns about global trade and the unevenness of the economic recovery. Moreover, they made their cases largely through oratory and direct communication rather than formulaic 30-second television advertising, which has been the norm. In November, the candidate who raised a lot less money and ran far fewer ads won by using tools that are at least theoretically available to others: a message that drew crowds and media attention, and social media.

Here’s where some of you say, “But Trump …”

I know, and I share many of your concerns. I voted for John Kasich in the Republican primary and the independent Evan McMullin in November – two candidates I believed offered positive, unifying visions. But, for one column, let’s look on the bright side, or at least all sides. It’s wrong to look at the world through rose-colored glasses, but it’s also a mistake to reach for the gray ones instead. In fact, it’s worse.

It wasn’t just in national politics where 2016 wasn’t so bad. In Arkansas, the Legislature met three times and along with Gov. Hutchinson produced tangible results in health care and highway funding. The unemployment rate in Arkansas is about 4 percent, which is far below the national average. Granted, that’s partly a result of the high number of former workers who have dropped out of the labor force, but clearly things are better than they were.

The Charles Dickens novel, “A Tale of Two Cities” begins with the words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Based on the way so many people talk these days – and have been for the past decade or two – you’d think these are just the worst of times. Let’s be realists, not cynics. By many measurements, Americans live better than 99 percent of all people who have ever lived.

So may we each have a happy new year while keeping the right perspective on the old one. Maybe it wasn’t the best of times, but the times certainly weren’t the worst.